Yom HaShoah
Ron Duncan Hart
April 22, 2025
As Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is observed on April 23rd, it is a day to remember the unthinkable killing of 6 million Jews and other millions of Roma, communists, gay people and political dissidents by Germans crazed by Nazi supremacy ideology in the 1940s. Why have some groups of humans been willing to accept the massive slaughter of people, whether it be bombing of civilian populations in World War II or the ovens in Auschwitz? When people become the “Other”, tyrants can lead their followers to accept killing or expelling them to be justified and morally acceptable.
“Shoah” from the biblical term in Hebrew signifying utter destruction and the “Yom” of day brings us to the day we remember the utter destruction of Jewish life in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1,000 days between January 1942, when the decision was made to kill all the Jews under Nazi control, and January 1945, when the German Army fled Auschwitz before the Red Army entered that death camp.
Nazis believed in the racial superiority of the Aryan “race”, and they used their sense of superiority to justify killing people of the supposedly inferior races, especially Jews, whom they defined as “unworthy of life.” This incredible policy of state-sponsored genocide blinded the citizens of the most culturally and scientifically advanced country in Europe to be led by a supreme leader to accept the systematic killing of a religious ethnic group, the Jews.
The utter destruction of the Shoah became a Holocaust, a destruction by fire on a massive scale. Jews were crowded into the twenty-three main Nazi concentration camps and most were eventually sent to one of the six extermination camps or mass killing centers, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. In those terrible 1,000 days, the Nazis murdered 6,000 Jews per day, every day, burned in ovens and buried in massive pits to eliminate the evidence. Ovens were specially designed by German architects and built by German citizens who knew what they were doing.
When Hitler, the idolized supreme leader, took power in 1933, there were 15.3 million Jews in the world and 9.5 million in Europe. When he committed suicide as Berlin was burning around him in 1945, there were only 3.5 million Jews left in Europe, two out of every three Jews had been murdered. Poland had 3 million Jews before Hitler and 45,000 after him; 98.5% of Polish Jews had been killed.
This year, 2025, the world Jewish population has finally grown back to 15.8 million people, but it has taken 90 years for the Jewish population of the world to return to what it was before the Nazi killing began. In the same time period, the world population has grown from 2 billion people to almost 8 billion people, virtually quadrupling, leaving Jews as a miniscule percentage of the world population, perhaps the smallest percentage ever.
As we confront the antisemitism and neo-Nazism sweeping across Europe and the United States today, we watch the upward spiral of antisemitic incidents that have broken record after record month by month and year by year. Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, launched the violent extremism of Nazi mobs killing Jews and burning synagogues, and it ended in the Holocaust. We must remember to protect the pluralism that permits us to live freely as Jews and counteract the hatred and violence against religious, racial or other human groups that destroy civil society and democracy.
Ron Duncan Hart is the founder and director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies in Santa Fe. Read now: "The Institute for Tolerance Studies Celebrates 20 Years. "
Shofar Blast is by Meredith Gould, a mixed-media artist in Albuquerque. View her work-in-progress on Instagram (www.instagram.com/themeredithgould.arts), Judaica at her Etsy Shop (meredithgouldarts.etsy.com), and painting originals at her website (www.meredithgouldarts.com).
